Ormiret.com - Thoughtshttp://ormiret.com/?q=taxonomy/term/2/0
enRussian dollhttp://ormiret.com/?q=node/34
<p>Brewdog have released a new experimental range exploring the differences between different styles of beer. Russian doll varies the strength of the beer between a pale ale and a 10.0% ABV barley wine. </p>
<p>I like the idea but unfortunately at every point I've tried Russian doll disappoints. The IPA can't hold a candle to punk. The double IPA is lousy compared to hardcore and the barley wine isn't a patch on clown king. </p>
<p>I don't know if this is a reflection of the effort put into the different beers (the ones I like are regularly produced so should have received more effort) or if this means the different styles require different approaches and Russian Doll was doomed to failure from the outset. </p>
<p>More data is required; I will have to drink more beer.</p>
ThoughtsFri, 12 Sep 2014 19:05:39 -0400ormiret34 at http://ormiret.comSome cameras may be harmedhttp://ormiret.com/?q=node/32
<p><a href="http://campgnd.com/">CampGND</a> is fast approaching so we've started to seriously look at what we can get up to over the weekend. </p>
<p>When I've been involved in running events before the running of the event has left little time for messing around with my own projects. I am hopeful that CampGND will be different - there is a pretty low ratio of visitors to organisers and the organising isn't much more than "Here's a field, have at it."</p>
<p>So, I am planning to work on some stuff. </p>
<p>First off I'm going to be pointing cameras at everyone else if they look like they're doing anything interesting. This should give a few short videos documenting what we get up to over the weekend. </p>
<p>On a similar vein I'd like to get some more interesting shots than can be achieved by me holding the camera so I have plans to make things to mount cameras on to get them to move in ways, and get to places, I can't. These plans are still a bit vague but include kites, and a dolly to climb/follow string that can be strung up to give nice panning shots. First tests of these contraptions will be with a cheap little video camera. If they look safe I'll move onto using an android phone. If I get brave (or drunk) enough I might even try putting my DSLR on them.</p>
<p>I have some plans to try making pizza on the BBQ. This might take a few minutes and produce beautiful pizza or lots of trial, error, burnt dough and many hours. We shall see. </p>
<p>57 North needs a flag. I am going to get some fabric and make one. I might also make a banner from our <a href="https://57north.co/wiki/File:57North_CoA_Concept.svg">coat of arms</a>. </p>
<p>I would like to have a go at doing some persistence of vision stuff. If I get through the other projects (or get fed up with them not working...) then I will be looking at making some LEDs spin with control logic to have them make pretty patterns. A bike speedometer thing may be sacrificed to achieve this.</p>
ThoughtsSat, 07 Jun 2014 13:27:04 -0400ormiret32 at http://ormiret.comImmortal Memoryhttp://ormiret.com/?q=node/29
<p>Burns is unique among great writers in how widely he is celebrated. The only people with more statues of them than Burns are venerated by religions. And they all had at least a millennium of a head start, so Burns might yet catch them. No other writer is honoured with celebrations such as a Burns night, happening so widely.<br />
The legacy that Burns has left is a testament to the breadth and magnificence of what he achieved in his too few years.<br />
His most lasting achievement is that Scottish culture and language survived as distinct from English. In the wake of the failed Jacobite rebellion there was a crack down on anything Scottish to get Scotland more homogenised with the rest of Britain and reduce the chances of another rebellion starting in Scotland. By Burns' time this had developed to a belief that any quality writing had to be in English and the risk that the Scottish culture of songs and folklore would be lost.<br />
But Burns took a stand.<br />
He combated the disdain for writing in Scots by producing works of undeniable quality in his own tongue as well as in English. He worked to save the folklore and folk songs by collecting them and writing them down so that they would survive and could be passed on without having to be taught directly. In this work he was aided by the Masons, as he visited various Lodges throughout Scotland and collected the local songs and tales.<br />
He also broke with the establishment in other ways. He wrote in support of the ideas that all people were equal and should be free. While these have become common place now they were in Burns' time quite radical. He was contemporary with the revolutions in France and America and the less bloody enlightenment here in Scotland.<br />
Alongside his lofty ideas ran a love of life that came through in his writing. One of my favourite lines goes:<br />
<cite>Whisky and Freedom gang thi'gither.</cite><br />
I think it improves any speech or writing on the subject of freedom and other exalted concepts to insert whisky with them.<br />
So we have Eisenhower:<br />
<cite>We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom, and whisky.</cite><br />
And Churchill:<br />
<cite>All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope, freedom, whisky.</cite><br />
Churchill would probably agree with the addition, as he was fond of a dram or two himself.<br />
And of course the line from Braveheart:<br />
<cite>They may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom, or our whisky.</cite><br />
Burns veneration of whisky was often reflected in his actions and it has been suggested that this should be combined with his tendency to chase women - he left at least 14 children to various mothers - in how we should remember and honour him: with an attempt at emulation by drinking as much whisky and sleeping with as many women as we can possibly manage.<br />
I certainly wouldn't agree with such suggestions, as I'd quite like to get out of here alive. But without fear for my safety there is another reason this may not be the best way to remember Burns: he himself gave us a warning against such behaviour in one of his most famous poems:<br />
<cite>Ilk man and mother's son take heed;<br />
Whene'er to drink you are inclin'd,<br />
Or cutty-sarks run in your mind,<br />
Think! ye may buy joys o'er dear -<br />
Remember Tam o' Shanter's mare.</cite><br />
So take heed and remember that if you drink too much and go chasing women *your* horse could end up without its tail.<br />
Finally, I'd like to give you a short tribute to Burns from someone who is probably his closest challenger for the title of greatest Scottish writer, William McGonagall:<br />
<cite>Immortal Bard of Ayr! I must conclude my muse<br />
To speak in praise of thee does not refuse,<br />
For you were a mighty poet, few could with you compare,<br />
And also an honour to Scotland, for your genius it is rare</cite><br />
For his love of whisky and warnings against excess, for his support of the radical ideas that now define our society and for his work to preserve the language and culture of this country I ask you to join me in raising a glass to the immortal memory of the Bard: Rabbie Burns.</p>
ThoughtsTue, 01 Mar 2011 18:55:20 -0500ormiret29 at http://ormiret.comN900http://ormiret.com/?q=node/25
<p>This is a post from my new N900. </p>
<p>I really like this shiny little beast, but do have a couple of gripes about the calendar:</p>
<ul>
<li>The date picker doesn't fit the way I think about dates. It lets you pick day, month, and year from dials which works great if you know the date you want to enter, but I often want to enter events for things like "next Tuesday" and I don't know what date that is without doing some counting (and I shouldn't have to do any counting when using a computer). You can get around that by picking the date before creating the new event but it is still a pain for picking the end date for things that run for more than one day or if something gets rescheduled.</li>
<li>Repeating events have only very simple rules. I have loads of events that happen according to patterns like "Second Wednesday of every month" which the calendar doesn't seem to support.</li>
<li>The default for events is to have an alarm. I rarely want alarms for events so would like to change the default to be no alarm, but I can't find a way to do this.</li>
</ul>
<p>The calendar is the only thing that's been a disappointment so far. Everything else I've played with so far is pretty much as expected with the browser being a bit more impressive than I expected.</p>
ThoughtsFri, 27 Nov 2009 10:43:19 -0500ormiret25 at http://ormiret.comWord to the wisehttp://ormiret.com/?q=node/22
<p>Don't configure a firewall to block all incoming connections when your only way of changing that configuration is via the network.</p>
ThoughtsMon, 24 Dec 2007 08:55:23 -0500ormiret22 at http://ormiret.comCampaign For Better Blogginghttp://ormiret.com/?q=cfbb
<p>The quality of writing on blogs has grated on me long enough that I have been pushed over the edge and become "That Guy": I have started complaining to the authors about it.<br />
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<p>The new media revolution has done wonders to grant a voice to many more people, but in bypassing the role of the editor as gatekeeper to determine worth we have also dispatched with the editor as a force to make sure your writing says what you intended, that the words are spelled correctly and that they are in the right order. This role now falls on the writer, and I would like to encourage greater vigilance on their part to reduce the number of errors making it to my screen<sup>1</sup>.</p>
<p>Putting extra effort into ensuring your writing is error free and carefully crafting each phrase to say what you want is more than just a way of getting out of getting emails or comments from me<sup>2</sup> though. It will improve the flow of the text for all your readers and make them more likely to still be willing to read your blog next time you have something to say. If you are trying to make an argument, it is far more convincing when it isn't littered with errors and doesn't require decoding before it can be understood. If your writing isn't worth your time to proof read: why is it worth my time to read?</p>
<p>I would like to issue a call to arms to others to also point out errors and maybe we can get bloggers to try reading over their text before they subject the rest of us to it - or at the very least to make corrections once they are suggested. </p>
<p>I <a href="mailto:ormiret@ormiret.com">eagerly await</a> the inevitable<sup>3</sup> complaints about errors in this post...</p>
<p><sup>1</sup> It will reduce the errors getting to other people's screens too, but that is just a nice side effect rather than the point.</p>
<p><sup>2</sup> With any luck, also from my army of minions.</p>
<p><sup>3</sup> If anybody actually reads this.</p>
ThoughtsThu, 15 Nov 2007 12:05:20 -0500ormiret21 at http://ormiret.comIdeal Window Managerhttp://ormiret.com/?q=node/18
<p>I have yet to find a window manager that doesn't in some way annoy me. I've decided to make a list of the things I want from a window manager. If anyone knows of WM that meets these requirements (or comes close and is easily hackable) I would be very interested, please <a href="mailto:ormiret@ormiret.com">tell me about it</a>. </p>
<p>The requirements are:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Tiling window placement</strong> I prefer this method as default. </li>
<li><strong>Support for "traditional" areas</strong> I want to have an area in the tiled layout within which windows are managed in the traditional manner for apps that don't work well in tiled layout (e.g. The GIMP). I haven't yet found a WM that does this and tiling </li>
<li><strong>Layouts</strong> I really like the layouts concept in ratpoison as opposed to the more common workspaces as it lets the same window appear in multiple layouts.</li>
<li><strong>Scriptable</strong> There should be some interface from which other programs can manipulate windows. I've played with Beryl's dbus interface and ratpoison's external command interface (call ratpoison with commands as arguments and the commands get applied to the already running ratpoison).</li>
</ul>
<p>I'm sure there are other requirements, and I will add them to the list as I remember/discover them. </p>
<p>I've considered a couple of approaches to making my perfect window manager. Ratpoison is only lacking the traditional areas, but I've baulked at adding such a feature as it looks like a lot of work: it pretty much needs a whole new WM built for such areas (if you can think of a way to integrate an existing WM for this purpose without too much work please <a href="mailto:ormiret@ormiret.com">do tell</a>). The other approach I considered was adding tiling support to Beryl. Beryl already has grouping features and adding to that to allow the tiling of a group and then it's treatment as one window by the rest of the WM would get most of the features I want (the ability to have one window show up in multiple places would be the only one missing). I haven't done this yet as it is still a bit of work and Beryl is sufficiently young to provide a fast moving target (technically I don't think it even exists anymore, having become compiz fusion) that might mean my addition would need a lot of maintenance to keep working with later releases. </p>
<p>Do you know of a window manager that does everything I want? Can you think of a better way to build one?</p>
<p><strong>Update:</strong> I have now found <a href="http://xmonad.org">xmonad</a>. It comes very close to meeting all of my requirements. It does tiling very well, although it uses workspaces rather than layouts there is an extension to clone windows so they can appear in multiple workspaces, it has a usable floating layer (though I'd like the ability to restrict it to a subset of the screen), I've not yet tried writing my own code to change things but doing so looks like a good excuse to have a proper play with Haskell.</p>
ThoughtsFri, 20 Jul 2007 23:21:34 -0400ormiret18 at http://ormiret.comJobshttp://ormiret.com/?q=node/16
<p>I will graduate in July so am currently doing the "looking for a job" thing. I'm a bit on the shy side so find this more than a little nerve wracking. It doesn't help much that I decided not to go for the big companies and their graduate training schemes. I didn't want to spend 2 (and in some cases more) years learning the organisational structure before I get to do anything actually useful. Such training is essential for people aiming for management positions in these companies but would be a waste of time for me since I don't want to do that.</p>
<p>I want a job where I get to play with interesting tech. That's about the only requirement I have.</p>
ThoughtsThu, 05 Apr 2007 20:30:26 -0400ormiret16 at http://ormiret.com